website

For many of the business owners we work with, the decision to upgrade or replace an existing business website is an easy one. In a lot of cases, the web presence they have simply doesn’t have the right look, features, or mobile functionality the company needs.

However, deciding to get a new business website is one thing, but creating a plan (and finding a vendor) is quite another. That’s compounded by the fact that a lot of decision-makers don’t really know what they want their new websites to do. They know they need something new or different, but don’t always have specific goals they are trying to accomplish.

With that in mind, we would advise you to begin your next business web design project with a simple question: what will the new website do for your business? What kinds of bottom-line goals do you actually want to achieve?

The answers are all up to you, of course, but here are some common ways you can use a stronger web presence to grow your business, along with a few you might not have considered…

When business owners and their web design teams launch a site, it’s usually with high hopes and big expectations. Before long, though, those feelings are highly likely to turn to regret and disappointment.

That’s because most business websites fail. They don’t attract enough visitors to affect marketing, fail to help a company stand out, and make no appreciable difference on the bottom line (beyond the sizeable sums that are spent to design them).

Believe it or not, that’s as bad for companies like mine as it is for businesses like yours. When clients are disappointed with their new websites, they are hesitant to invest in online marketing again. And more often than not, they tell their colleagues to avoid making the same mistake.

The mistake isn’t getting a new website, though, it’s going about it the wrong way. I’ve learned again and again over the years that businesses—and especially small business—make the same few blunders that hold them back. To help you avoid them, here are three big reasons most new websites fail…

Now more than ever, business owners are obsessed with attracting inbound leads from their websites. That’s a good thing—if your web presence isn’t generating sales opportunities, then what’s the point of having it in the first place?

At the same time, though, a lot of marketers seem to think that the process will take care of itself if they just put up a nice enough layout and some content that’s free of obvious typos. Unfortunately, it takes a little more than that to find business on the web. In fact, if you want to attract leads with your business website, there are a few steps you’re going to have to follow every time…

Albert Einstein once referred to compounding interest as the “eighth wonder of the world.” He was talking about the tendency of money to grow over time, but he could have just as easily have been referring to the exponential power of content to attract new visitors to your website… had such a thing been invented in his era.

As it turns out, the pages, posts, and articles you add to your website do indeed grow just like your invested savings do. In fact, content can be almost better, since the results of content marketing are more predictable than the stock market.

To understand why there is so much power in having new articles and ideas being added to your site all the time, let’s look at a few of the positive effects that grow and increase in strength over time while you keep generating content…

Small issues can create large problems. For instance, something as simple as a broken link breaks the flow of your website and may prevent leads from contacting your firm. It’s important to be aware of seemingly innocuous errors that can sabotage your site.